Monday, 27 February 2017

Quotes 2017 #58

"Far from engaging in a philosophy of a subject, Michelet and
Quinet think of the people in light of their problematic---for always
deferred---identity. Rather than embodying a self-presence, the people
either are ABOVE themselves---the people in the heroic state that
establish themselves in the very invention of liberty---or they are
BELOW themselves, when the experience of liberty threatens to revert
into its opposite, namely servitude. In short, never coinciding
with themselves, never equal to themselves, the people are
simultaneously where they are manifest, and where they come to
existence, confronted with the ordeal of an insurmountable
self-discrepancy. A discrepancy that would wrongly be considered a
shortcoming, for it is quite certainly by this deficiency, and by
maintaining it, that the opportunities for an anti-authoritarian city
are encountered."